


Bamboo Bones

by perceived_nobility



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, F/F, Gen, M/M, Parent-Child Relationship, Suicidal Thoughts, Trans Chuck Hansen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-25
Updated: 2020-11-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:00:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27717158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perceived_nobility/pseuds/perceived_nobility
Summary: “I don’t understand,” Herc told him, no matter how the fuck he said it. Anger choked his throat and his hands were big, throbbing fists. He got right up in Herc’s face like this was a game of telephone and his words were losing meaning the longer they had to be in the air.“Well, you’re gonna, huh!” It came out like a threat, but he meant it more like a fact. They just had to drift together. Then his dad would see.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14





	Bamboo Bones

**Author's Note:**

> "Don't let them break you.  
> Don't let them tell you who you are.  
> Doesn't matter where you come from,  
> You'll always have a floor to sleep on.  
> And you have your bamboo bones,  
> Nervous energy,  
> Blind ambition,  
> Skin of your teeth.  
> Push back, push back, push back,  
> With every word and every breath.  
> What god doesn't give to you,  
> You've got to go and get for yourself." -Against Me!

The first person Chuck ever drifted with--this girl in his academy class, Tammy? She pulled the shitty old pons helmet off--it was actually new-ish at the time, because the PPDC was getting funded out the ass and the war was at the sweet balance point of hard but winnable--stared Chuck dead in the eye, and said, "Why didn't you TELL me your name was Charles?" And then turned around to the rest of the cohort, clustered at the glass outside the simulation chamber, and said over the mic, "Everyone? This is Charles, and he just kicked some Kaiju ass!"   
  
So really, you can't blame him for having expectations.   
  
\--   
  
"I hope it's okay, what I said," Tammy told him later, cheek pillowed on her drawn-up knees. They'd snuck out to the far end of the athletic fields, where nobody really bothered to patrol, and if they did you could see them coming.    
  
Chuck shrugged. He felt weird, too big for his skin, like he imagined Usagi Tsukino felt when her cat started talking and said she had magic powers. Except he didn't have a rhinestoned compact to hold that would unlock him: just a heavy helmet that smelled like lice shampoo and a classmate who reached into his brain and dragged out a wish he hadn't known how to ask for.   
  
He and Tammy hadn't even been particularly close before today, but he supposed that drifting with anyone would have changed that.   
  
"You...too?" He said, faltering, trying to piece the strobelike flashes of Tammy's memories into a patchwork that made sense.   
  
"Yep. But I knew when I was a little kid."   
  
"You take--" he squinted, willing the flash of a foil punch card of pills to resolve itself in his brain.   
  
"A couple things. Blockers for the testosterone my body produces and supplementary estrogen. I can help you get on something, if you want. I know the best doctors."   
  
Chuck stared out at the grass. He wished his own head made as much sense to him as it apparently did to Tammy.   
  
"Do you think that's why we got paired up?"   
  
"I don't know. Could be. There's a lot of articles out there about brain structure--most of them are bunk, by the way. But it could be part of why we're drift compatible. Our brains want the same thing."   
  
For years, Chuck replayed that conversation over in his head. He wondered if that was why things were so bad, sometimes. If his brain was too different--if it had some weird neurological accent that other brains couldn't translate. Time after time, his life didn't add up to make it true. He'd drifted fine with plenty of people: cis, straight, both at the same time. None of them ever tripped over it like it was some heavy, ugly thing Chuck should have thought to put away before he had company over inside his own head.   
  
\--   
  
True to her word, Tammy introduced him to the best doctors on base and they set him up with a plan. The plan started with Chuck waiting ten months to turn eighteen before they did anything, so they didn’t have to get his dad involved. He went a little apeshit on the doctor, to be honest: the policy was fucked. He could die for the sake of humanity but he couldn’t get a prescription. The doctor weathered him with decent grace, probably used to breaking bad news to hotheads, and that was that. Chuck would wait.

“Why don’t you just tell him?” his dorm-mate Anita asked later, one foot tucked under her, watching her drift partner and girlfriend Kaori shuffle cards. “I’m sure the rule only exists because the PPDC is a giant shit-heap of bureaucracy that can’t update its own rules. Like, fuck, we’re battling alien monsters from the bottom of the ocean! I’m sure he can handle calling you a different name.”

Chuck kept watching his foot connect with the metal bedpost as he kicked it over and over, the shock thrumming up through his toes. He wasn’t good at talking about this. Wasn’t good at talking about much, really. Thankfully, Tammy leaned backwards out of the top bunk, handheld gaming console held up to her face, and saved his ass. 

“Shut up, Anita. Parents are weird. They, like, run all these mental simulations of ‘What will I say when my child says he wants to drop out of high school?’ ‘What will I say when he gets arrested for possession with intent to distribute?’ But they never think, ‘What will I say when my son tells me he’s my daughter?’ So even  _ they _ don’t know how they’ll react.”

She waved the console in Chuck’s face until he grabbed for it, saw she caught a Dialga. “Nice,” he told her, and handed her her game back.

\--

The thing was, drifting was this shorthand that gifted you an almost perfect understanding of a person in an instant. It was like a bridge straight to your destination when you were used to taking the road. You didn’t learn everything instantly, of course: you started with what their brain was shouting the loudest, and worked your way down into the quieter thoughts from there. It wasn’t uncommon to have seen your drift partner’s family die before you knew their favorite pizza topping, or if they ate pizza at all.

Once you’d taken the bridge a few times, it really started to sink in how long the road was. How little you really knew about someone if all they could do is tell you. 

The nature of secrets was very strange, Chuck thought, anywhere people Drift. People were more than happy to leave well enough alone, perhaps especially because, in the span of an instant, things that would otherwise only be your business became, very thoroughly, someone else’s. 

Word got around about him without him needing to say much. He didn’t get asked many questions. Anyone who put on a Pons next to him learned more than they ever would have thought to ask, anyway. 

Sometimes, he tried to talk about it. Mostly to Tammy, because she got it, in an inside out kind of way. She wrinkled her nose when he bemoaned the shape of his chest, how it weighed on him. How he couldn’t sleep, sometimes, for feeling it. He could never say anything straight out, but it didn’t matter. They drifted together enough that, even if he was trying to describe something she’d never heard of, she understood.   
  
“I’ll tell him when I change my name with the Corps,” he told Tammy, but by then, she already knew.

\--

When he was a kid, his Uncle Scott was the cool one. The one who brought him expensive gifts when he was between deployments, who taught Chuck to count cards so he could beat his friends at Cheat. As he grew up, the halo around Uncle Scott got brighter, stoked by his decorations, his press tours. It got so bright Chuck stopped being able to see his face, and by the time Scott was let go from the PPDC, Chuck realized he had been taking the road. He didn’t know his uncle at all.

He tried to comfort himself, when he heard the news that Scott was gone and he, Chuck, was relocating, that whatever Scott had done must have been worse than what Chuck, suddenly, was staring down the barrel of doing. The PPDC didn’t kick  _ Chuck _ out, after all. So he couldn’t become the black sheep of their meagre family. He couldn’t.

\--

Everyone with living parents in his class told him how sorry they were that he had to drift with his dad. They were all imagining their own parents discovering the nights they spent crossfaded on the back pitch at the academy, the fake IDs they used to get laid by strangers at clubs when they were sixteen and seventeen and so were half the people in the place on Dollar Shot Wednesdays. Some of them were afraid they’d have to see their parents having sex, or their own birth. 

The video of Chuck’s birth was on a DVD that got broken some time during one of their relocations to a new Shatterdome. He watched it a lot, before that, mainly because it was one of the few surviving pieces of footage of his mother. She was in a lot of pain the whole time, despite the drugs that made her loopy, too. Chuck thought she must have looked about the same when she was dying. 

\--

“I don’t understand,” Herc told him, no matter how the fuck he said it. Anger choked his throat and his hands were big, throbbing fists. He got right up in Herc’s face like this was a game of telephone and his words were losing meaning the longer they had to be in the air.

“Well, you’re gonna, huh!” It came out like a threat, but he meant it more like a fact. They just had to drift together. Then his dad would see.

\--

It was weird, growing up, to be the kid of a Ranger. Not at the Dome: whenever he went to school outside, which was at international schools full of kids of diplomats. Herc wanted him to have a normal life, make friends with other kids his age. He kind of did. Mostly he got in fights. 

Every first day of school, someone came up to him, stars in their eyes, and asked, too quietly, what it was like to be the son of  _ Her _ cules  _ Han _ sen. Chuck never knew how to answer. It was OK, mostly. They didn’t really get along, especially as Chuck got deep into teenagehood and started dyeing his hair un-regulation colors. They always wanted him to talk about how awesome his dad was, how heroic. How his shit didn’t stink and he sweated multisurface cleaner so their kitchen always looked immaculate. Truth was, their kitchen looked a little like shit because Herc was rarely there and Chuck didn’t bother to clean when he accidentally burnt shit. And it was infuriating for total strangers to tell him, out of their own asses, how perfect his dad was all the time.

Herc had made a big mistake, one Chuck spent a lot of time forgiving him for, and then unforgiving him all over again. It was something he didn't talk about. Not to his classmates, not to Herc and definitely not to the PPDC shrinks he, like every Ranger, needed to check in with every six months or so--more often if you saw something bad happen. 

See, way back when Chuck was eleven, he was in school when Scissure decided to wreck the shit out of Sydney. The family was stretched like the arms of the plush monkey he'd gotten at the zoo that had I LOVE YOU THIS MUCH embroidered on its stomach. He was in school, his mom across town. Herc in the middle, with short arms.

He ran the wrong direction.

\--

The first time he drifted with his dad, Chuck broke his Pons. Full on smashed to pieces on the floor, hydraulic fluid sliding from cables that hung like entrails from the ceiling. 

What exactly his body did was never clear to him. Which was fairly common back then. A lot of the time, he didn’t feel like he filled his whole body. Mixing in sense memory of someone else’s meat package and the incomprehensibly huge body of a Jaeger--honestly? Made it better. Mostly he felt more like himself in a Jaeger than he did out of one, which was common enough for pilots. 

He  _ did _ remember Herc’s memories, scarred white in his brain like the afterimages of fireworks. 

The worst part was that he and Herc shared a bunk and that Herc came to find him afterward because he wanted to talk. They never talked about anything, even back then. And anyway Chuck couldn’t talk because he couldn’t breathe because he was crying too hard. Herc sat next to him with a heavy hand on his back and Chuck couldn’t tell him to go away. 

Two days later, when they made them drift again, Herc apologized for the hand. Said he didn’t know it had felt that bad. He didn’t apologize for anything else, and his brain was screaming the same thing as the first time.

\--

“You have to give me time,” Herc told him. “This is--new for me. I’m trying. You gotta be patient.”

Chuck was not, historically, good at patience. 

\--

It got worse. 

His dad had this loop of thoughts--not memories, or not  _ only _ memories, because most of it was made up. A scene of Chuck at his wedding popped up a lot. It played and replayed and played again, the resolution on it worse each time. He mainly tried to look at the spouse Herc had picked out for him. At first, it was a man: tall, broad-shouldered, with kind eyes. Then it got fuzzy, jumping like a glitch in a videogame between the man and a weirdly out-of-focus woman and a vaguely human-shaped blob. The end was always the same: a zoom-out shot of the whole shebang, matching chairs, organ music, Chuck in his mother’s wedding dress and what must be ass-length hair all piled on his head like whipped cream, sucking face with his husband. He always turned away, fingers sliding from his husband’s, and threw his arms around his mother, who was sitting in the front row. She looked like she did when she died, except with wrinkles pasted on like bad CGI. The camera swooped in, dark tuxedoed arms coming to wrap around both their shoulders, and Chuck and his mom would look up, teary-eyed, the spit of each other.

There were other scenes, too. Chuck watched himself with kids rubbing sticky fingers in his face, his hair in the weird over-the-shoulder braid he associated with cartoon mothers who died early. He watched himself become, of all things, an astronaut, but not in a way that interfered with the kids. The first time he saw himself waddling with late-stage pregnancy, he threw up in his helmet and had to be helped out of the cockpit by medical personnel. He couldn’t take his hands off his stomach, afraid it might balloon out without his permission if he didn’t keep ahold of it.

Shortly after that, Herc started talking to a Corps psychologist every week. When Chuck heard, he laughed in his face. You only talked to the psychologists that often if you saw something bad happen, like your drift partner dying. 

Then they drifted again, and for the first time, Chuck was treated to his own funeral. Open-casket. A whole lot of flowers. He looked peaceful, and more or less eighteen, which was eight years late, but at least his dad was finally getting with the program.

But a year later, the funeral scene was still playing in Herc’s head every time they drifted. It got longer, too. There was a whole second act when the doctor who’d performed Chuck’s top surgery came in with a scalpel the size of a small sword and butchered Chuck’s lifeless body, camly and viciously. At some point, the venue changed to the small, sad church where they’d put up a picture of his mom over an empty coffin. 

“I’m not her,” he said into the cockpit that rang silence loud in the aftermath of a kill. He and Herc were waiting for assistance out, both doubled over in the phantom pain of Striker’s foot getting halfway ripped off. “She’s fucking dead. You killed her.”

\--

The war went on. People left. People died. New people came in and replaced them. It seemed like Chuck was always meeting them through his dad.

“Hercules Hansen. And this is my--kid. Chuck.”

He gritted his teeth through all of it, shook hands and tried to make his mouth look nice. 

It would have been better if he had still been drifting with Tammy. Or anyone else, really. Anyone who would have understood. Anyone who would have stopped his sense of time from getting fucked up. He stopped knowing what day it was, what month. He spent more time than he knew staring at his face in the mirror, watching it change, reminding himself of the road he was walking. The afterimages of fantasyland shot across his vision, that bridge to his dad like a wormhole to a timeless room in a faraway castle where he slept forever on a plinth. He was supposed to wake up a boy, but he never did.

People started avoiding him. He was angry all the time, so he couldn’t really blame them. It meant that, increasingly, the only person he talked to was Herc, and increasingly they didn’t talk at all. Mostly, Chuck talked to Max, the apology bulldog Herc had shown up with one day way back at the beginning of this shitshow. Max talked back, sometimes, and sometimes he just licked Chuck’s face. 

Chuck couldn’t tell anyone how he drifted with his dad for that long. He couldn’t tell anyone that, coming out of it, he always went and puked in the locker room bathroom, curled on the floor in a ball and sobbing, sometimes under the shower, sometimes not. People just let him. Rangers had all kinds of weird habits, and one time Chuck had nut-punched the guy who’d put a hand on his shoulder, trying to help. 

He always got up. Sometimes it took most of the day, but he did it. He always went back to their bunk, too. The thing was, no matter how much fetid grief was tangled up in Chuck, the drift had shoved some of Herc’s in with it, and the echo of it hurt more with distance. They were each always worse out of sight from each other. So he went home and spent some time just sitting near his dad while they pretended they weren’t evening the score: Herc cataloguing the things he still recognized, Chuck watching for all the real estate Herc couldn’t quite look at anymore. 

\--

At some point, it felt like his jaw locked up. He didn’t smile anymore. It had been years. The doctors said at this point the T was a maintenance dose: nothing more would really change. His brain was hoarse from screaming all the time.

Of course, the war was taking its toll on everyone. The slow process of disbanding the PPDC made it all worse. Nobody knew where they were going after, except to their death. Plenty of Rangers got quiet, got angry, got so that outside their Jaegers they didn’t move right. Herc was distracted and worried and for once it wasn’t about Chuck. The drift became a clenched mess of broken futures neither of them could imagine.

For his part, Chuck couldn’t take looking down the barrel of the end of the Jaeger program. There had been a time when an end was all he wanted: an end to the war, to the horrifying casualties, to chasing death every day and never catching it. An end to beating against the fine filament between his brain and his dad’s, the window he watched through as his dad tortured them both. But at some point, during those quiet times after a mission when they sat in their room, not talking, Chuck had gotten thankful. This way, he always knew where he stood. He didn’t have to watch his dad’s face all the time, or pay attention to how long he paused before he called Chuck by name. He just had to wait until the doomsday clock rattled back to zero, and then he knew.

\--

When Chuck was younger, still a squirt crashing into walls, he wanted to grow up to be Raleigh Becket. He had a poster of him taped to his wall right above his bed, even though it was gouache to look like you idolized Rangers when you lived at a Dome. Chuck didn’t know quite why he liked Raleigh so much and he got tongue tied and beet red whenever anybody asked. 

“You  _ liiiiiiike _ him!” his classmate Kayleigh crowed one night when she was sleeping over. And, at Chuck’s high-shouldered cower, “You  _ do! _ You want to  _ kiss him _ and  _ hug him _ and” her voice dropped to a whisper, “ _ you want to have his babies _ .”

Chuck kicked her, sending sparkly purple nail polish skidding across her foot and his bedspread. She shrieked and pulled his hair. Eventually, Herc came in and pulled them off each other and made them each write an apology letter to the other one. Kayleigh’s parents picked her up the next morning and nobody said anything about the fight. When she was gone, Chuck went back and laid on his bed, the bedspread flipped over so the stain was on the inside, and stared at the poster. He felt awful, not for fighting with Kayleigh, but for his feelings about Raleigh. He’d screwed up. Rangers kissed beautiful women and had beautiful babies with them. He knew, deep as bone, that he was wrong for Raleigh. It didn’t matter if he grew up to be beautiful. Raleigh would love women.

He ran himself in circles for hours, trying to make the tautology resolve. It felt dangerous to even think about liking Raleigh. Raleigh was a boy. 

Herc knocked on the doorframe. “Hey girlie. Dinner time.”

That settled it. Raleigh was a boy, Chuck was a girl, and the weird awful clench in his stomach was because he hadn’t eaten since breakfast.

\--

When he met Raleigh Becket in person, he still looked like everything Chuck wanted. It made him furious. Raleigh’s name fell out of Herc’s mouth like it was easy. Raleigh got to take a break in the middle of the war to go be off by himself in Alaska, just another drone building a wall, only known for the strength of his body. And now, coming back, he got to have his pick of all the eligible pilots, any of whom Chuck would have traded his right arm to be partnered to.

He moved with taunting ease, swaying his hips, bundled in the kind of soft sweaters Chuck used to wear all the time because they were big and they made him look like a ball. He talked back to the Marshal. Chuck’s stupid heart wouldn’t stop hammering. Raleigh looked like he did in the poster: older, yeah, but with the same wide shoulders, the same solid chest and big hands. 

The last time Chuck felt like this about Raleigh he was small and curvy and thought all sorts of dumb, wrong things about himself. Watching Raleigh poke at potatoes, his body felt like a mannequin. Herc talked to Raleigh like they were friends and here was Chuck, in this big fake costume he’d sewn for himself, and there was Raleigh, filling up his body all the way down to the toes because he’d had his whole entire life to love being in it, and who wouldn’t, when they just got to wake up and look like he did.

Chuck fucked up Raleigh’s name because he should know how bad it felt, and then he walked his stupid, jerky mannequin body away from the table before the whole ruse of himself fell apart in the middle of the mess hall at the stroke of 7:46 pm. 

\--

He didn’t mean to end up at the Kwoon, but his feet took him there anyway, like a cruel joke. Raleigh looked unbearably good dancing with Mako: fluid and light, almost flirting. Chuck resigned himself to standing in the background and getting good and mad all over again. Sometimes that helped--finding somewhere quiet, nobody looking at him, where he could feel the full burn of his anger as long and hot as it took to eat up all the fuel and die. When he was in front of people he needed to watch out and be nice to, trying to snuff himself out was like covering open flame in sand. 

But the clench never came. His hands stayed unfisted. If anything, he loosened, swayed up onto the balls of his feet, dropped his hips until he was rocking with Raleigh’s rhythm. His elbows jigged in imitations of parries, tension swung up through his shoulders--ready to hit, yes, but not to hurt. Half the time he punched to feel something in himself, to slam home the boundary between himself and the world, to say, sternly, loudly, that he went this far and no further. He didn’t want that, watching Raleigh in pseudodrift. He wanted the opposite.

Raleigh would have understood. Raleigh was a good listener. But Chuck already had a drift partner so he wasn’t eligible to find out. 

Except Mako wasn’t eligible either, and he’d never hated her before. But then again, she’d never taken anything he wanted before, either.

\--

Fighting with Raleigh didn’t feel like a conversation. It felt like an ass-whooping. He kept trying to get up, to get in it, to speak loud and fast enough that Raleigh would hear. 

Instead, all he did was throw himself against a wall. Raleigh pissed as hell and patient with it, taking Chuck down like he was a child. A demonstration. 

His dad dragged him off, but he’d already as good as given up. 

\--

When Otachi and Leatherback came, the first thing Chuck saw in the drift was Raleigh’s face. At first he was unsure whose brain had thrown it up there, his or his dad’s. The scene was first-person, set somewhere way out of focus. Raleigh looked nervous, eyes all big and his jaw working.

“Sorry, sir, I know it isn’t my business. But I thought--you had a daughter?”

The drift reverberated pain, phantom and sick in his gut. Herc had to clear his throat before he spoke. “I suppose I would’ve, wouldn’t I, when we jockeyed.” 

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

Chuck felt the indrawn breath. He heard all the thoughts that got jammed up in Herc’s head: should he correct Raleigh? What would he think? What would he ask? Would Herc know the answer, or would he fuck it up? What would Ch--A--[loud, toneless emotion like microphone feedback; the force of will to school his thoughts into line]--What would Chuck want him to say?

“It’s just--you can tell me to buzz off, it really is none of my business. But is that why Chuck’s--? Because his sister died?” Raleigh has this look on his face like a dog when they know you’ve been crying. “I was pretty messed up when I lost my brother. I know it wouldn’t have been the same, but if you think it would help, I’d be happy to talk to him.”

Chuck couldn’t tell when this was: before the fight or after it. Herc apparently had imagined an altercation: Chuck yelling, red-faced, at a hangdog-looking Raleigh. The plucked string of tension during the drop, Chuck terse on the coms, Raleigh confused and frustrated and trying not to think about it, shaky in his own drift. Guilt, familiar as breathing, that Herc hadn’t prepared any of them for this.

“Thank you, son, for the thought. We were all sad to hear about Yancy. Our situation is--well. It’s different. And complicated. Maybe some time when the end of the world isn’t bearing down on us, yeah?”

Then the drift took proper and the scene was yanked out of his head through an eyeball and he was left staring at the heads-up display with anger fizzing out to his fingertips.

They had a lot of time to stand there in Striker and silently shout about it. It felt like tug-of-war in reverse: Herc would push guilt into Chuck; Chuck shoved anger back; Herc responded with the confused hurt that always reminded Chuck of stepping on Max’s feet. For his part, Chuck couldn’t decide which he was angrier about: that his dad thought his temper would get in the way of his piloting, or that Raleigh learning one fact about Chuck could, in essence, prevent them from stopping the end of the world. He took deep, full-body breaths, trying to keep himself calm. Wouldn’t do to prove his dad’s point.

A new thought pooled in the back of his brain, sharp and cool as rainwater. He was mad because, in essence, Herc thinking he couldn’t manage his anger made him feel like Herc didn’t know him at all. After all, every drift they’d ever had together, Chuck had been angry, and their kill rate was just fine. 

Every drift they'd had together, Chuck had been  _ Chuck _ , and their kill rate was just fine.

He didn't feel Herc decide to disengage. He felt the movement as it happened, phantom in his arm. He yelled, but it was too late.

For a sickening moment, there was silence. Herc lunged for the flares while Chuck was frozen in place, not even sure if he was still yelling or not. There was noise in his head but he couldn’t tell if it was coming out of his mouth.

The whole cockpit shook. Chuck felt the snap in his dad's shoulder clear as the drift.

\--

They didn't let Chuck into the infirmary while his dad's shoulder was getting set. Probably smart: he felt like he could break something just by standing next to it.

He paced the hall outside, steel walls and thick HVAC piping impervious even to him. He thought about laying his fists into the wall but stopped himself. Sure he'd see his dad sooner, but he'd just see him disappointed.

"Hey." Raleigh's face was careful. Chuck thought about punching him instead of the wall, but, like the wall, he'd mostly be hurting himself. He kicked at the floor instead, hands jammed into the pockets of his flight jacket. His foot ached reassuringly.

Raleigh leaned up against the wall next to him, arms gentle at his sides. "Your dad told me about your sister," he said, eyes flicking over to Chuck and away again, trying to assess without looking like he was doing it. “I can’t imagine what it’s like.”

Chuck jammed his hands into his armpit. Grunted. Too fucking right.

Raleigh picked a spot on the wall and settled into it, wiggling like a dog making itself a bed. He hooked his thumbs into his beltloops, loose, easy. “I had to leave. When my brother died, I couldn’t come back for a while. I thought I’d never come back. Drifting--you’re flayed open. Everything’s right there: you and someone else. When I was grieving, I had to be alone. It was hard enough to pick at my own pain, without other people’s pain mixed up with it.”

“He wants to remember her.” Chuck was surprised to find his mouth moving. “All the time.” 

Raleigh’s mouth quirked. Chuck could only see a sliver of it. He couldn’t tell what it meant. 

\--

The worst part was, Chuck knew he owed his dad an apology. 

See--Chuck didn’t know. He didn’t know soon enough. He didn’t know until he was in the academy and Tammy barged into his head. He kind of knew before that, or at least he had thoughts, and a lot of feelings, but he didn’t have any words, and so he couldn’t tell his dad. 

Chuck could have fixed all of this if he’d fessed up before he was eleven. His dad could have agreed with him, and run the right way.

\--

Herc was out of commission. Grounded. He had a sling and a prescription and strict orders to lay low. He refused to let Chuck help him, so Chuck moved all Herc’s toiletries from their shelf to the back of the toilet and fucked off.

Raleigh found him in the Kwoon, going through forms. He came in so quietly that Chuck didn’t notice until he centered into rest pose, staff sheathed at his hip. 

“Hey.”

“What.” He felt wrongfooted. The Kwoon wasn’t private, per se, and it wasn’t like he reserved it, but he also wasn’t expecting to be interrupted. Or watched. His stupid arms swayed up to cover his chest. Raleigh watched him do that, of course, and he’d definitely noticed the scars tucked in the shadows of Chuck’s pecs. 

Chuck wasn’t ashamed of his body. What the fuck was he doing.

“Can I spar with you?” Raleigh asked, and Chuck noticed dumbly that he was in loose pants and an undershirt, barefoot. 

Chuck jerked his head at the racked staffs and moved into starting position. The mat felt like it always had against the four corners of his feet. 

The fight started slow, Chuck trying to figure Raleigh out. Raleigh let him, patient. Chuck drove harder: was Raleigh mocking him? 

He ended up on his ass.

Annoyed, he reset. He wasn’t here for another ass-whooping. 

Raleigh refused to strike first. Chuck swung in a wide, sarcastic arc that Raleigh sidestepped like he was ignoring it. Chuck followed in fast, pushing the tension in his jaw out through the end of his staff. Raleigh leaned aside. 

The next strike came from Chuck’s throat; his neck; his chest. Raleigh met him, and met him, and met him. Chuck struck from his stomach, from behind his stomach, again, again. He was crying in deep, heaving sobs. Raleigh slowed, braced with his staff held out strong in front of him. Chuck hit it and hit it and hit it, and Raleigh let him.

\--

“I never had a sister.” Chuck daubed ointment on the split blisters blooming all across his palm. Raleigh looked over from towelling off his hair, but didn’t say anything. The shower room was empty, save for them: nobody lived in B block anymore, but it was conveniently close to the Kwoon. 

“I’m trans,” Chuck continued. “My dad--” What could he say? He shrugged instead. Gauze next, over the ointment. 

“Thank you for trusting me.” Raleigh always managed to sound like a poster when he talked. 

“Yeah, well. I didn’t want you-- whatever. Pity under false pretenses.”

Raleigh’s mouth puckered up like Chuck had fed him a lemon. He swung a leg over the bench so he could face Chuck head on, all steam-ruddied skin and Pons scars and one ratty, overbleached PPDC towel hitched around his waist. “I don’t pity you.”

Chuck couldn’t help the snort.

“I don’t.”

“Sure.” Chuck wrapped tape around the gauze and ripped it with his teeth. 

“Do you want help?” Raleigh inclined his head toward Chuck’s equally blistered right hand. Chuck felt his face do something strange. He’d’ve pinched himself if the throbbing in his palms wasn’t proof enough he was awake.

“I’m good.”

Chuck spent years with that stupid poster on his wall, and then under his bed when he got too embarrassed to keep displaying it. He’d basically  _ prayed _ to that thing for--well, lots of things. Chuck had been so confused, staring at the dim glint of paper-Raleigh’s nose in the dark, if he wanted to  _ be _ him or  _ kiss _ him. Turned out it was both.

Chuck clawed his way into half of that dream, and it was better than the alternative, but not anywhere near what he wanted. He didn’t get what he wanted, ever. He knew this.

The gauze kept shifting as he clumsily wrapped the tape. He could feel the heat in his cheeks. 

“When are you going to let go and let someone help?” 

Lots of cis people asked him this, over the years. The stupid thing was that he  _ had _ let people help: Tammy, his doctors, his Academy friends. It wasn’t his fault that the other people who asked him didn’t make the short list.

“When the world isn’t ending.” Chuck managed to wrestle the tape into place and smacked it down. He fumbled under the bench for his shirt. Raleigh watched him as he stuck his head through both armholes before getting it right. He had this calm about him, like his body was full of water. Chuck still wanted to be him.

“The world’s been ending for 12 years.” 

“Must be almost done then, hey.”

\--

On the day after his mother died, Chuck and Herc went back to the house to see what they could salvage. Chuck found his monkey buried under some rubble, one arm thrown out, beckoning. He skidded to his knees, throwing chunks of drywall aside. The monkey was facedown, dusty, but apparently intact. When he picked it up, the fabric of its face drooped open, weeping soiled stuffing and shards of glass. 

\--

Herc was lying in bed when Chuck got back, propped up on both of their pillows with Max pooled between his feet. 

“I’m gonna need that later,” Chuck pointed out, jerking his chin at his pillow. Herc grinned wanly.

“Gonna make your poor old man use the laundry as medical equipment?”

“Better the laundry than  _ my _ pillow. How’s the arm?” Asking felt strange. The last couple hours, between Herc’s solo medical visit and now, felt like the farthest apart they’d been in years.

“Fine.” Herc’s head lolls to the side.

“That you talking or the oxy?”

“Fucking doctors. Gave me a shot of that shit without asking first.” Herc hated narcotics. Chuck had felt his nausea whenever new pain threw ripples of old injuries up in the drift.

“They had to put you out, hey. Can’t work on you if you’re kicking like a rank stallion.”

Herc’s gaze went vacant and Chuck got ready to be busy passing the time while he passed out. “I remember you, right after your surgery, all hopped up.”

All of Chuck’s muscles seized up at once. This was his top surgery, although of course he’d been  _ in _ surgery several times before and since. Herc had barged into his recovery room, somehow, even though Chuck had made it clear he didn’t want him there. He probably pulled rank over some idiot intern. Chuck didn’t actually remember this: he was out of it still on anaesthesia. Tammy had been there and she filled him in later. Just that his dad came in, bright eyed, jaw clenched, and hung around for a few minutes before leaving again. 

Tammy herself had been in the middle stages of recovering from one of her surgeries, so they weren’t on missions. He’d recovered before her, and they’d assigned him to someone new. She’d been transferred to Lima shortly after, and shortly after that, she died.

This moment had come up in the drift before, from Herc: a confused mess of bandages and blankets and tubes, the whole image blurry and jittery, like a bad home movie. Herc’s worry the loudest thing in the scene.

“You were unconscious. Your friend was holding your hand. When I came in she told me it went OK, you swam around and looked at her, like you were almost awake. I don’t know if you knew I was there. You smiled. You couldn’t have known yet what you looked like? But you looked--” Herc’s voice was breaking. “You looked  _ so happy _ .”

In all the drifts, Chuck had never been able to see his own face in that memory. He probed, but his own memory was lost to the drugs. Not uncommon. 

“I was, Dad.” 

Herc nodded like this answered something for him. Chuck dithered for a while in the middle of the room, not sure what to do. Eventually he went to the bathroom, just to be somewhere else.

\--

Chuck had a plan for when he eventually would get called up on a suicide mission. Every Ranger did. 

He'd expected to feel relieved when the call finally came. 

He was shaking and he couldn’t stop himself. The Marshall like a boulder beside him. He knelt down and Max licked his face and he couldn’t feel any of it. He was crying. He knew because it was hard to see.

Herc was crying too, dwarfed by the cavern of the hallway. Just a man with such short arms.

“That’s my son you’ve got there.” Chuck whipped around. His heart was outside his chest, beating somehow between them in open air. Herc looked him dead in the eye, like he was trying, on will alone, to muscle up onto the bridge from the road below. 

  
“My  _ son _ .”


End file.
